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Another auto-belay accident, except it wasn't an auto
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I haven't heard all the details, but news has been going around the groups at my local gym that a visitor to the gym clipped in to a top rope route grigri, thinking it was an auto belay, proceeded to climb it, and took a ground fall. The individual was taken to hospital by paramedics. To us climbers, something like this seems absolutely impossible. How could you mistake one for the other? My gym (like most lawsuit avoidant gyms) does the following:
What got me really thinking after this tragic incident is not the details of how or why this happened, but rather what factors caused the individual in question to disregard their sense of self-preservation. You can't tell me that any random person upon seeing two slack rope ends at a crag, would immediately try to climb it! (Maybe they would, I've been surprised before...) To me it read almost like this person felt like "rock climbing in a gym" meant that all aspects of risk were removed from the activity, as though the colourful holds and on-site staff meant a completely sanitized and fun experience. Certainly, gyms seems to market themselves that way... but to what end? "Climbing is an inherently dangerous activity", we've seen that in many places, including the manual in every piece of gear we buy, but curiously, it is absent from gym materials... |
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Julian, Daniel: We aren’t all the same. The world has such a large variety of people. Some of us have an extreme lack of mechanical aptitude. It isn’t hard to imagine such a person clipping into a grigri pre-rigged onto a top rope and climbing … if that is the case. |
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There's got to be more to the story... |
Bill Lawry wrote: It's hard for ME to imagine it. If you're right though, there is someone out there who would step out of an airplane without a parachute because people skydive regularly. |
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Not many of us interface with the public on a climbing basis though a gym does. Once worked with someone who climbed who really struggled with tying a figure eight. Otherwise, in casual interactions, you would not know. Professional guides likely know or hear of such cases. The reference to natural selection would likely be hurtful to those close to the person. Kinda sad to see the callousness. |
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100% believe this because I have seen similar things. I have worked in the climbing gym/guiding world for 10 years and have seen plenty of “peculiar” behavior. Couple of things come to mind in cases like this.
I imagine we might see “lifeguard” type personnel start cropping up in the climbing gym industry. Gym staff often scan gyms periodically, but as more accidents happen, I could see a dedicated “lifeguard” role becoming necessary at gyms. |
Bill Lawry wrote: That's the thing that makes me wonder... If the rope hadn't been pre-rigged, would this incident have been avoided? I know gyms do it for convenience, so climbers can get going with minimal investment, and liability, so they don't get rigged backwards/at all. I suppose a pre-rigged system means fewer things can go wrong, but it also minimizes the appearance of danger, especially for those who are new to the sport. |
Evan Kirk wrote: Same gym another time, a parent and child were awaiting orientation during a busy Saturday afternoon and elected to just go climbing instead. The parent clipped the grigri into the child's harness and proceeded to hold the sharp end loosely while the child climbed. That time, two of us and a staff member rushed over in time. |
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My apologies for using the term “Darwinesque”. |
Daniel Joder wrote: This. The last I heard from The Front in SLC was that they were removing their auto belays until further notice. I'm not climbing at The Front atm so can't confirm if they're back up. |
J L wrote: I happened to be visiting in Hamilton over the weekend, and went climbing at Gravity. The pre-rigged TR gri-gri’s have surprised me. I’ve only seen this setup in one other gym, over the course of 20+ years, and many random gyms visits around the world. But a Canadian friend was saying that it’s much more common in the Ontario area, and she gets surprised when she needs to produce a gri-gri for gum TR while traveling. It’s almost always the case that a “safety measure” designed to eliminate one line of errors introduces a new/unexpected/unanticipated mode of failure. Some people shouldn’t be left unsupervised. Unfortunately, it is hard to determine this fact beforehand, so the solution usually includes more supervision for everyone, and is ultimately still not enough to make things completely risk-free. A staff member felt compelled to come and tell me this weekend that my failure to tie a double-fisherman’s knot was unsafe, and a violation of the gym rules. I apologized, of course, and started tying it. I would have been faithfully following the gym rules to begin with, but I had done a belay test in this gym about 6-7 years ago, and this was my first visit since that time, so I simply didn’t remember that they required the double-fisherman to finish. |
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I’ve been to gyms where there are no supervisors or people doin jack around to keep this from happening. But hey dude shouldn’t have been climbing |
J L wrote: Read the waiver, look at the signs on the walls, listen to the staff. |
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How can seemingly impossibly "dumb" things happen? Because our brains are magnificently complex, and, can talk us into all sorts of things being quite reasonable. And we survive that, all the time, day to day, probably rarely even knowing we just courted some unexpected result. Ah crap. Did I really just aeropress my coffee directly onto the countertop?? Geez.... Except it's climbing. If you think you could never ever be "that person"? You may be correct.... For that particular bit of idiocy. Let's just hope your less than perfect moments are never more serious than the coffee mess to sop up, eh? Best, Helen |
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I post this on my refrigerator to remind myself everyday…. he’s been hot on my heels for decades  Some day he’ll catch me. Just a matter of time. |
Igor Chained wrote: I spoke with an employee at the front, and he told me they noticed a few of the auto-belays were failing to retract properly, and so they sent them back into the manufacturer, and won't put them back up until they're fixed, and the issue is explained to them. This is third hand info, so take it for what it's worth. |
Mark Pilate wrote: Huh? I’m dense. Please explain. |
Marc801 C wrote: Darwin. |
Marc801 C wrote: Gravity never sleeps. |
Lena chita wrote:
It's interesting to me because while Gravity isn't my home gym, every gym I've been in Southern Ontario is like this. Your friend is correct. Every TR is pre-rigged, and a stopper is mandatory because it's ostensibly "safer". So when I have occasion to visit a gym outside of my home province I am always amused by the relatively hands-off approach. If the rest of you visited my gym you'd probably feel overly policed. But that's exactly why I posted this topic. Has my gym (and those around me) fostered an environment where a layperson can feel like they're climbing with guardrails, and completely trust their safety to the gym? How does this factor in relation to the drive to make climbing more accessible to the average person? |
